The National Aquarium’s new Harbor Wetland shows the great potential of creating wildlife habitat in cities. With just 10,000 square feet, it has already drawn otters, herons, ducks, crabs, fish, eels, and jellyfish in the first few months since it opened.

The $14 million constructed wetland in Baltimore, Maryland was designed by landscape architects at Ayers Saint Gross, a multidisciplinary firm. It improves the harbor environment and advances research and innovation. It’s also a free educational landscape that inspires the public to reconnect with nature.

“The Harbor wetland is an example of how to marry science and art,” said Amelle Schultz, ASLA, PLA, a principal and landscape architect with Ayers Saint Gross. “It leaves no doubt that landscape architecture is a STEM discipline.”

Schultz said the floating wetland may look simple but in reality it’s a complex work of design and engineering. “Only about one-third of the project is visible; two-thirds is below the surface.”

The wetland has many layers. More than 32,000 native tidal marsh shrubs and grasses form the top layer. They were planted in recycled plastic matting that will allow the plant roots to grow down into the water, providing habitat for dozens of species and filtering the harbor water.

Amid these plants are shallow channels, with beds of oyster shells that provide additional habitat. Compressed air is pumped into these channels, bringing dissolved oxygen into the harbor and keeping water circulating, like in a natural tidal marsh.

This entire system sits on top of another layer of custom pontoons. Their buoyancy is adjusted as the weight of the wetland increases with plant growth. The pontoons also support the walkways and outdoor classroom spaces that line the wetland. “Traditional constructed wetlands eventually sink under their weight — this one won’t,” Schultz said.

Sitting at the end of the classroom space, hundreds of feet into the harbor, there is a surprising moment of serenity. It’s easy to forget about all the engineering and technology and just imagine you are in a natural wetland.

And the project also makes it easy to imagine more wetlands in the inner harbor. The wetland supports the aquarium’s long-term ecological research and will inform the creation of future constructed wetlands. The system is designed to help make the case: Sensors embedded in the wetland test the water quality, and researchers are documenting species populations.

Schultz thinks one measure of the project’s success is the incredible range of species that now visit. “The aquarium’s interior exhibitions are built to be natural, but the animals can’t leave. The animals that visit the wetland choose to be here,” she said. The diversity of species that visit were a surprise: “American eels are really hard to find in the harbor.”

The grasses are important habitat for many species the aquarium wants to track. As they were growing in, the aquarium even added a plastic coyote to scare off geese, which would have made a meal of them. “It’s more of a joke now than a deterrent,” said Shelley Johnson, ASLA, PLA, senior associate with Ayers Saint Gross.

Harbor Wetland also builds on research conducted on a smaller prototype just a few feet away in the same bulkhead, which was initiated more than 10 years ago. Ayers Saint Gross worked with Biohabitats, McLaren Engineering Group, and Kovacs, Whitney & Associates to advance an initial concept created by Studio Gang.

“Even in the prototype, the aquarium team saw small fish come to the small stream in the middle of the wetland. No one expected that to happen,” Schultz said.

The aquarium thinks the Harbor Wetland will boost the local economy. “The wetlands will bring more people to the inner harbor,” Johnson said. “Not everyone can afford tickets to the aquarium, but they can visit the wetland.”

School groups are already visiting, where they are given tours by aquarium researchers. The mural that frames the wetland expresses the aquarium’s hope that more young people in Baltimore will be inspired to join the effort to restore the Chesapeake Bay.

“Landscape architects led the team to the solution — the technical and scientific aspects, and married that to the public realm,” Schultz said.

The technical work alone realized benefits: their innovations led to three new patent applications focused on the integrated buoyancy and aeration system.

Superstorm Sandy inundated Lower Manhattan, causing billions in property and infrastructure damage.

To protect against future flooding, storm surges, and sea level rise, landscape architects are developing an innovative mix of green and grey solutions along the southern coast of Manhattan.

These are not nature-based solutions but forms of armor. And designers are showing how this armature can be woven into the public realm, creating new kinds of infrastructure.

Smart design is resulting in retractable gates and walls, landscaped berms, and raised platforms. No concrete walls separating communities from each other or the waterfront here.

The concept behind this effort is called the “Big U” and it came out of the Rebuild by Design competition funded by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) in the aftermath of Sandy. Since then, billions in federal, state, and city funds have gone to making the plan a reality.

The plan is being designed and implemented through the Lower Manhattan Coastal Resilience Program. This effort spans many jurisdictions and includes lots of smaller projects, explained Gonzalo Cruz, ASLA, vice president of landscape and urban design at AECOM, during an event organized at the offices of SCAPE as part of Climate Week NYC.

AECOM has developed the master plan for the projects. “There are twelve teams on board, with so many involved — 200 to 300 people, even for the smaller projects,” Cruz said.

All teams are united behind the goal of creating new infrastructure that reduces flood risk but also creates places people want to be in.

Under FDR Drive on the east side of Lower Manhattan near the Brooklyn Bridge, AECOM is adapting a linear park designed by Ken Smith Workshop.

A series of retractable gates are being woven into the park along the East River. “They are like transformers,” Cruz said. “During major storm surges, they will flip up.”

The gates enabled the landscape architects to keep the waterfront as open and accessible as possible during good weather.

Further north on the east side, landscape architects with MNLA are bolstering 2.4 miles of riverfront from Montgomery Street to 25th Street. The riverfront and nearby communities are in the floodplain. During Sandy, many of the housing developments were hit hard and isolated by rising waters. So the plan also addresses their risks.

The East Side Coastal Resilience Program strings together a necklace of neighborhood parks that double as flood protection systems. Some are wider than others.

New riverfront parks will be eight feet above the river and essentially built on top of the existing parks. “The new parks are integrated with the flood protection,” said Molly Bourne, ASLA, a principal at MNLA.

To improve the resilience of the landscapes, MNLA added in a diverse range of soil mixes, trees, and plants that can handle “wind, waves, inundation, and salt.”

Narrower parts of the linear park include defensive berms but still offer space for bike lanes and pedestrians.

A new pedestrian bridge high over FDR Drive will improve access to the waterfront but also ensure the community will not be isolated in the next superstorm.

The Big U continues around to the west side of Lower Manhattan. There, landscape architects at SCAPE and BIG have been designing the Battery Park City Resilience Projects.

In seven projects, “we are using berms, platforms, hills, and retractable gates to create a line to stop the water,” said Greta Ruedisueli, ASLA, an associate with SCAPE. They are all “strategically placed” to blend into the communities.

In some neighborhoods, existing waterfront platforms are being raised and rewoven into the community.

And in others, subtle grade changes and berms help maintain the line of defense, while flood walls built into constructed hills ensure no river surge will seep underground into the community.

The grade changes and land forms enabled SCAPE and BIG/CSM to increase biodiversity through native trees and plants and provide spaces for residents and visitors to sit and take in the nature.

In Rockefeller Park, a flood wall is being stitched into a housing development so it becomes unnoticeable. “The wall is a textural element. It can be concealed when it is high through material, color, and hue,” said Rachel Claire Wilkins, Affil. ASLA, a senior landscape designer with BIG/CSM.

All of this new infrastructure is being designed for the future. “We expect the flooding to be higher in 25-50 years,” Wilkins said.

It is also being designed to flood and then bounce back from inundation. “Occasional flooding will be OK,” Bourne said. “What is important is that the landscapes remain usable up to the water’s edge.” To ensure that, all the grey infrastructure and the trees and plants are being designed to adapt.

Still, Bourne thinks these projects are “precedent-setting,” because they haven’t been done before in a dense area like Lower Manhattan. “We are in new territory. But we designed this infrastructure to be easier to maintain in the future.”

Cruz said that other landscape architects working on coastal flood defenses need to understand how the engineering works before bringing design ideas to the table.

“You will be crushed if you don’t understand the mechanisms. We can’t be too tree hugger-y. These systems have to perform. It’s about how to make them last the longest and provide the most benefit to the most number of people.”

Buildings, landscapes, and infrastructure are responsible for more than 40 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions each year. Reducing the use of materials with high embodied carbon, like concrete, metals, and plastics, is key to bringing down those emissions.

Landscape architects who have used Climate Positive Design‘s Pathfinder know it’s a tool for calculating the carbon footprint of a landscape design. It then helps designers figure out ways to reduce emissions from materials and increase carbon sequestration faster.

The new version Pathfinder improves on those capabilities but also enables landscape architects and planners to do much more.

“We decided it’s time to deepen our carbon accounting and evaluate other factors — biodiversity, equity, cooling, and water conservation — with the same rigor,” said Pamela Conrad, ASLA, founder of Climate Positive Design and ASLA’s inaugural Biodiversity and Climate Action Fellow.

The new updates will help landscape architects achieve more of the resilience, equity, and biodiversity goals of the ASLA Climate Action Plan.

In terms of carbon, Pathfinder 3.0 “makes it easier to cut ‘business-as-usual’ emissions in half by 2040 and double sequestration,” Conrad said. This is because it now offers “more insights on lower-carbon materials and specific suggestions on how to improve your project’s impact.”

For biodiversity, the tool helps landscape architects track how well their design helps achieve the global 30 x 30 target. This refers to the target set by world leaders at the UN Convention on Biological Diversity COP last year that calls for all countries to protect 30 percent of land, coastal, and ocean ecosystems by 2030.

Pathfinder 3.0 helps landscape architects:

• Identify the biome and eco-region of their project site
• Determine how to best protect and enhance native species
• Create designs that increase biodiversity by at least 10 percent

“Pathfinder is not just helping users visualize their options. It’s also supporting innovation and creativity in transformative design,” said Colleen Mercer Clarke, an interdisciplinary scientist and landscape architect, who is special envoy to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) at the International Federation of Landscape Architects (IFLA).

Landscape architects can also now see how well their designs increase equitable outcomes by providing greater benefits to Justice 40 communities.

Pathfinder 3.0 aligns with the U.S. government’s Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool (CEJST), which determines whether a project is in an underserved area. If the site is outside the U.S., a landscape architect can also identify the site as being in an underserved area based on CEJST criteria.

Curious to learn how much a design can cool a community? Pathfinder 3.0 shows how well a design reduces severe heat areas, which have been defined by the Trust for Public Land. It enables designers to see how much shade is created through different design strategies.

In terms of water conservation, the tool now shows how to reduce water use through projects by 30 percent. It uses baseline data from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s WaterSense.

Climate Positive Design undertook such an ambitious expansion because they see landscapes increasingly serving as critical infrastructure. With climate change and biodiversity loss, landscapes must do more for communities.

“Landscape architects are uniquely qualified to drawdown carbon, create healthier communities, and protect ecosystems through our projects,” Conrad said.

“We have an opportunity and responsibility to address all of these through our work. But we also need to be able to measure those strategies and impacts.”

To better measure impacts from a wider range of materials and their transportation to sites, the new Pathfinder aligns with the datasets of Carbon Conscience, a tool that can be used to cut emissions in the early concept phase. It also aligns with new industry standards being developed through the Embodied Carbon Harmonization and Optimization (ECHO) project.

Learn more about Pathfinder 3.0 and explore an updated user guide and methodology. Check out their design toolkit, which is based on the ASLA Climate Action Field Guide.

With Architecture 3030, Climate Positive Design also updated the 2030 Palette, a “visual database of sustainable design principles, strategies, tools and resources.”

There are new resources on:

• Coastal seaforestration
• Drawdown
• Afforestation
• Urban gardens
• The 15-minute city
• Regenerative peri-urban agriculture
• Water-smart landscapes and systems

Also worth exploring: a comprehensive new guide to climate action planning and a decarbonization framework, which were also developed with Architecture 2030.

ASLA releases three new resources that cover how to decarbonize landscape architecture project specifications, the design process, and navigate environmental product data

ASLA has released a set of freely-available guides designed to help landscape architects, specifiers, and industry partners achieve the goals of the ASLA Climate Action Plan, which includes making the profession zero-emission by 2040.

The resources were developed by the ASLA Biodiversity and Climate Action Committee, a group of landscape architects charged with implementing key aspects of the plan, including how to decarbonize projects while increasing biodiversity. Landscape architects play an important role in designing nature-based solutions to climate change that also help communities become more resilient.

“These guides are the practical tools landscape architects have been asking for. They help turn every project into an opportunity to get on a path to zero emissions,” said ASLA CEO Torey Carter-Conneen. “They take our high-level goals and break it down for everyone – showing landscape architects and industry partners how to get there, step by step.”

“With climate impacts only worsening, we know we need to change how we design – and make that shift faster,” said April Phillips, FASLA, Chair of the ASLA Biodiversity and Climate Action Committee. “So we got to work, creating substantive how-to’s any landscape architect, specifier, or industry partner can pick up and start using today.”

New resources include:

Decarbonizing Specifications
Guidelines for Landscape Architects, Specifiers, and Contractors

Developed by:
Chris Hardy, ASLA, PLA, Sasaki
Alejandra Hinojosa, Affil. ASLA, LPA Design Studios
Elizabeth Moskalenko, ASLA, PLA, Hazen and Sawyer
Bryce Carnehl, Corporate ASLA, Hunter Industries

These guidelines make it easier for landscape architects to more effectively reduce greenhouse gas emissions from project design and construction. Sections cover seven key design principles and 18 areas of specification.

They are for landscape architects and designers, specifiers, contractors, and manufacturers who want to cut emissions and increase carbon storage and sequestration faster.

Decarbonizing the Design Process
A Phase by Phase Approach for Landscape Architects

Developed by:
Alejandra Hinojosa, Affil. ASLA, LPA Design Studios
Mariana Ricker, ASLA, SWA

This guide offers a phase-by-phase structure to decarbonize design through big ideas, strategies, and best practices. It is high-level, offering approaches that can be implemented regardless of project type, scope, and scale.

The guide offers decarbonization opportunities for:

• Project kickoff
• Schematic design
• Design development
• Construction documents
• Construction administration
• Operations and maintenance

Navigating Environmental Product Data
A Guide for Landscape Architects, Specifiers, and Industry Partners

Developed by:
Amy Syverson-Shaffer, ASLA, Landscape Forms
Sasha Anemone, ASLA, Salt Landscape Architects

The products and materials that landscape architects specify for their projects play a significant role in the overall global warming potential (GWP) of a project. They can also impact biodiversity, air and water quality.

The guide outlines how environmental product declarations (EPDs) and other environmental reporting can be used to understand the environmental impacts of landscape materials and products and make decisions to reduce those impacts.

These new resources are what ASLA members and industry partners stated they needed in survey responses gathered over the past two years.

The guides are designed for the broad landscape architecture community, including:

• Landscape architects
• Landscape designers
• Other specifiers
• Industry partners that develop the products and services used in landscape architecture projects

The best practices in the guides can also inform the work of planners, architects, engineers, and urban designers.

The ASLA Climate Action Plan calls for all landscape architecture projects to achieve these goals by 2040:

• Achieve zero embodied and operational emissions and increase carbon sequestration
• Provide significant economic benefits in the form of measurable ecosystem services, health co-benefits, sequestration, and green jobs
• Address climate injustices, empower communities, and increase equitable distribution of climate investments
• Restore ecosystems and increase and protect biodiversity

26 CEOs of landscape architecture firms recently released a letter committing to the goals of the plan.